TEMPE, Ariz. -

With more consumers shopping for their next car using their mobile devices, DriveTime wanted to upgrade its offerings in an effort to capture those potential sales.

On Tuesday, DriveTime announced the launch of a new mobile site with innovations designed to extend to both the customer experience and the technology DriveTime employed in launching the site. 

Customers will now see:

—Improved and faster page navigation when customers are on our site (single-page application platform).

—Changes to content layout and imagery based on user behavior.

—Content tailored to the phone location (geolocation logic).

—Enhanced vehicle photos.

—New search filters to enable customers to find exactly what they are looking for in DriveTime’s new used car inventory, including number of prior owners and accidents.

—Market price comparisons on thousands of used vehicles.

—Three-day guaranteed online pricing of customer trade-ins that’s being tested in select markets.

—Easy to find AutoCheck vehicle history reports on any of the 15,000 DriveTime used vehicles available nationwide.

At the same time, DriveTime emphasized that it has retained all of the existing customer friendly features of the DriveTime experience, including:

—Streamlined contracting and e-signing

—Speed of financing online with a credit score and starting down payment in less than two minutes

—No haggle pricing, a no questions asked five-day used vehicle return program

—Salaried sales advisers at dealerships focused on helping our customers find the right used vehicle for them from the thousands of used vehicles available

“There are a number of off the shelf mobile or website products offered by vendors to the new and used car industry.  With over 1.2 million users each month on our desktop and mobile sites, we elected to custom develop our mobile site based on what customers are telling us they want — quick and easy access to the information they want to see, a customer experience game changer in used vehicle retailing,” said Scott Worthington, DriveTime’s vice president of retail marketing.

“We’re just beginning to reimagine the entire vehicle retail experience,” Worthington added.

DriveTime also found it needed cutting edge technology to deliver these unique, new customer experiences.

Don Irwin, director of IT, and Shawn Curran, managing director of retail and marketing product development, said, “With 125-plus IT employees at DriveTime, we have a large pool of IT expertise to draw on to review and execute exciting new technologies that allow us to truly enhance the customer experience within the used car industry.  And, the mobile site was a key priority for our digital retailing initiatives. Because of our customer experience focus, load time and navigation performance were critical concerns during the development of the new site. 

“It was also a lot of fun to dig further into SEO compatibility because of our unique approach with the single-page application platform,” they continued. “Our team also implemented a best in breed solution incrementally delivering data as required to make the used car shopping experience as fast as possible. 

We accomplished this using the Angular 4+ client-side framework and Node.js for the server build, and for data and other dependencies we were able to use bleeding edge technologies like Azure CosmosDB, Azure Search, Azure CDN, Redis Cache and Azure Service Bus,” Irwin and Curran went on to say.

“From an IT perspective, we had a blast with this project,” they added.